NYT admits: Glenn Beck’s DC rally had ‘a few hundred thousand people’

He was an unfocused student with discrete passions and talents who could have benefited from a more stable home environment — and a prescription for Ritalin. (…)

He tells of walking into a bookstore and loading up on books by a hodgepodge that included Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Carl Sagan, Nietzsche, Billy Graham and Adolf Hitler.

“The library of a serial killer,” he called it. (…)

He has perfected the Everyman shtick that presidential candidates spend years trying to master in places like Iowa. No doubt, someone loyal to Beck will read that and say, ‘No, no, it’s not a shtick.’ Like many famous performers, Beck is described by friends and supplicants as someone who is authentic and real, that what you see is what you get. (It’s usually their public-relations person who says this.) (…)

Beck’s Anchorage show started late — around 9 p.m. — and Beck was still speaking as 11 o’clock approached. He kept going, and going, and delivered a stem-winding ending about how George Washington became terrified at the end of his life about doing something that would dishonor himself and his country. I looked around the crowd of about 4,000, and it seemed no one had left. The room was perfectly silent after two hours plus — late on a Saturday night — to hear a self-described “recovering dirtbag” with not a single college credit to his name teach them history.

(…)

He says he is a softie who is prone to crying during television commercials.

*** (Actually, that’s a fairly common trait among alcoholics, in and out of recovery. Jungians, knock yerselves out.)

One thing I did find fascinating — because I was listening to Glenn Beck’s radio show while reading this New York Times profile — was how often Beck used/uses the phrase, “I’ve never done/told anybody this before…”

I hadn’t noticed this before and maybe it is some new thing.

Whether or not it is a “drunk” thing, too, I’ll leave for you to decide.

I also learned that next year is the last on Beck’s contrast with Fox News. Hmmmm.